India Innenga: Toward a More Radical Selfie

Jan 12, 2019

Pontifications

"We are currently confronted with questions that, until recently, seemed behind us. Is asserting self-love affirming and feminist, or is it playing into age-old misogynist reductions of women as fetish objects? Where do hashtag trends like “I woke up like this” and “celebrities without makeup” quite fit in? Do they acknowledge the pressures that women face in a gendered society, or do they simply obscure the means of beauty’s production? To break past this surface we must ask: where is the work? I mean, really, who seems to work anymore? All we see is women on vacationcooly “off duty” in the day, beguilingly gowned at night. Studios and offices serve as backdrops for fashion shoots, not meaningful loci of productivity. All these women “woke up like this”: capturing and captioning themselves from the moment the dawn light began streaming in." <--- Read the whole thing: India Innenga: Toward a More Radical Selfie